Abstract

In this paper I mainly draw attention to the largely discussed § 244 of the Philosophical Investigations of Ludwig Wittgenstein. I begin by providing what I take to be a right reconstruction of the argument in it, in which Wittgenstein maintains that, in contradistinction to the presup-positions of the supporter of a private language, we learn words for sen-sations, like “pain”, for example, not by correlating the sign directly with the corresponding sensation. Instead, “pain” is learned in connection with the natural expression of pain, with pain-behavior, so that the word takes the place of the natural expression. Next, I develop two lines of criticism on Wittgenstein’s argument. First, I argue that Wittgenstein does not explain how the learner substitutes the conventional expression for the natural one. Second, I maintain that, in his explanation of how we learn words for sensations, Wittgenstein shares one of the most impor-tant presuppositions of the private language, the very one that he wanted to discard once and for all, namely, that one can know from her own case what pain is